Turns out that Jenna has started a trend of people chucking nooses here and there, every which way kind of like decorative Christmas baubles and tinsel. Of course, racism doesn’t really happen any more these days. It’s just a piece of string. And a cross is just a funky piece of woodwork, the vitruvian man is just a few chicken scratches and those white lines in the road are spilt paint and nothing more.

Shock at noose found on NY campus

Students at Columbia University were shocked by the incident
A black professor at Columbia University in New York has found a hangman’s noose left on her door.

Police are investigating the incident as a possible hate crime.

Gee, ya think?

I don’t like the way this article paints an incomplete picture of the events of Jenna. There is a cynicism that there must be some kind of excuse for this. The full story is hidden with just enough revealed so you can tell something upset people but it doesn’t quite correspond to the reaction. The reality is rather different but also rather predictable.

The idea of nooses being hung on the doors of professors and in institutes of learnings harks back to the early days of integration. It’s hard to see how this would be out of place 100 or 50 years ago.

Haven’t we, as cultures, moved onwards?

That’s seriously depressing.

Columbia University has not identified the professor who found the noose on Tuesday, but students say she teaches a class on racial justice.

Aah… puberty. The nostalgia of that crushing feeling of awkward self-loathing… Your body deciding that it will either take years to get to the same spot as everyone else or that it’ll rush so quickly that the rest of you is left miles behind… Don’t you wish you were back in time; sitting in a classroom crossing and uncrossing your legs, trying to figure out how to exit the room tactfully and gracefully, whilst smuggling a tampon like a ninja on a mission and simultaneously stopping everyone from seeing the back of your skirt because you’ve got a sensation that bits of your insides are seeping through your clothes into a red stain?

It’s about to get a lot worse in the fascist control-phobic systems…

The girl was called out of class by a security guard during a school sweep last week to make sure no kids had backpacks or other banned bags.

She says he told her she couldn’t have a purse unless she had her period. Then he asked, “Do you have your period?”

…It appears that at least a few other girls were also asked the same question…

The small Sullivan County school has been in an uproar for the last week. Girls have worn tampons on their clothes in protest, and purses made out of tampon boxes. Some boys wore maxi-pads stuck to their shirts in support.

After hearing that someone might have been suspended for the protest, freshman Hannah Lindquist, 14, went to talk to Worden. She wore her protest necklace, an OB tampon box on a piece of yarn. She said Worden confiscated it, talked to her about the code of conduct and the backpack rule — and told her she was now “part of the problem.”

Inquiring minds want to know… how they going to check girls are telling the truth about said period?

This is more a question of paranoia over concealed weapons than sexism… After all the only way to make sure that someone isn’t carrying any kind of weapon is making them go naked… incidentally…

Two days ago, state police say, a 16-year-old boy wearing nothing but a paper bag on his head streaked through the high school as students arrived. The boy was charged with public lewdness, a misdemeanor. He told police he was protesting the backpack policy.

Aaaw… Creepy arse officials but those kids seriously brighten my day. Do you think we could market this tampon jewellery? 🙂

As I finished work at about 2 o’clock today I decided to hang around town a bit, get a few chores done and finish penning a letter to a friend who is working across the country and without e-mail whilst sitting in a coffee shop. There was a fun fair on and I decided to go on a ride because I was stressed and, face it, I’m ultimately a child when it comes to stuff like that.

I go on the Helter Skelter- It’s a bunch of cars that spin around on the spot as they go around the ride and up and down on the wooden slats which undulate.

I’m wearing a long heavy skirt and as I walk up to the ride and sit in I jokingly turn to the guy putting me in and say “I’m not going to flash everyone, am I?” He replies cheekily “I wouldn’t mind.” I laugh- I kind of did feed him that one and I’m used to that kind of flirting. He didn’t go beyond the line I set in my question so I didn’t mind.

And then he starts bouncing, lightly jumping, on the wooden slat. This makes the car I’m in bounce. Thus making me bounce. Thus making- you guessed it, my boobs bounce. Noticeably. He looks down a me and, from his face, the intuition that women develop about this stuff and just the fact I’m not stupid , I know that’s exactly why he was doing it. To watch my boobs bounce whilst there’s nothing I can do because I’m sitting beneath him, strapped into a ride. He keeps on doing this and positions himself behind me. The ride starts slowly at first and he notices me looking quizzically at him – that quizzical, frozen smile look – and he says;

“They bounce quite nicely, don’t they?”

So not funny and so not talking about the plank of wood. So he sticks by me, as the staff is doing- given an extra spin to the car when they slow down and an extra bounce every so often.

I’m feeling seriously nauseous and not from spinning, I’m trapped and my breasts (which have/are growing due to some freaky late puberty thing so having them remarked upon is strange in itself) are starting to hurt. I feel so angry that somehow he’s taken my body and cut it apart like I’m a piece of tissue in a lab and he’s prodding me for a reaction I can’t control and yet can’t stop producing. He turned my breasts and my body into his objects completely disconnected from me. I felt powerless and that in itself is a violation.

And yeah, that’s a risk you get from Living Whilst Female and I’ve had stuff like that before and it’ll happen again. But it still ruined the Fair for me and it still made me, if only for a second, hate my body and the fact I have breasts. And that is wrong.